All posts tagged: cake

I’m thrilled to have received so many success stories from you all about the Eggless Birthday Cupcake recipe I posted a few weeks ago. You’ve shared them across Facebook, Instagram and via email and like a proud mum, I fill up with joy every time I see your recipe remakes. Today is my 30th birthday and I’ve been sharing recipes here for 10 years. Can you believe it?! With each year, I’ve grown as a person, learning more about myself than I ever thought I would through a medium as lighthearted as a recipe blog. Exploring my cultural heritage through food has helped me get to grips with my own personal identity. With this I’ve understood and embraced what “home” really means to me. It’s where my family are; My husband, my son, my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, and their children, all sitting around a dinner table eating great food and just being… well, a family. Many of you know that I was born in Britain, the daughter of immigrants with Indian and East …

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandparents recently. I never really knew them, two of them not at all, and for that I feel utterly cheated. I’ve always known it. I guess this is just the first time I’ve ever put it into words. I think about what they were like, their interests, loves, hates and of course, what they cooked. My ears ache to hear the stories behind Cauliflower and Cashew Curry, 7-Vegetable Khichri and Dhilo Mohanthal. I know they were famous in our family but where did my grandparents learn to cook them and most importantly, who or what inspired them in the first place? Nanabapu and Bapuji were chefs with the best kind of training – doing apprenticeships in hotels and restaurants, and later cooking their family recipes for other families. I think we’d have been great friends and I, an excellent student. I wonder if they’d teach me the skills I need to pipe Ghatia (fried chickpea snacks) and Jalebi (syrup-soaked spirals) the way they did in India and Kenya? I’ve learned …

If you’d have told me before today that there’s something quite beautiful about making your own pistachio paste from scratch, I’d have probably told you you’re a mug. Turns out it’s only bloody brilliant. I’ve been nuts about pistachio desserts ever since my taste buds got their first fix of the gorgeously-green ice cream as a kid. That sweet fragrance of pistachios and just a hint of almond reminds me of both Indian sweet shops with their rows upon rows of Pista Halwa and cherry-topped Bakewell Tarts. It’s what I imagine heaven for sweet-toothed food bloggers smells like. Also present in said heaven would be Mr Kipling (the master of baked goods), Lionel Ritchie (with his smooth-as-buttermilk voice) and Madhuri Dixit (with her timeless beauty). So like all the components of this, my dream cake… all the greats. To get the perfect green pistachio paste, the pistachios should be unsalted, shelled and skinned. If you have the good fortune to encounter them in all their emerald-green glory in a shop, buy them. If, like me, …

There are some flavour combinations that just shouldn’t be messed with. Mint and chocolate is one of them. The Mr isn’t a fan of desserts. I’ll often spend hours in the kitchen trying to perfect eggless and vegan cakes, cheesecakes, cookies and brownies. Yet no matter how happy I am with how one might have turned out (which, I’ll be honest, doesn’t happen often), he still won’t touch it. Unless it’s mint chocolate. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like ice cream. That changed when I met my husband. I’ll be honest, I thought it was super weird. The one exception to his no-ice-cream rule is mint chocolate, it has to be totally frozen (soft serve is never an option), topped with strawberry syrup and hazelnuts. Just. So. Weird. So here I am. It’s Valentine’s Day – which for the record, I think is a load of old bollocks. We don’t do presents and ridiculous extravagant gestures – we never have and never will. However, it isn’t very often he doesn’t work weekends so when …

After a blissful late honeymoon in Phuket, Thailand, life in chilly England resumes. But thankfully I brought a few exotic Thai goodies back in my suitcase. Mango wafers, longan toffees, Thai honey and this gorgeous flaked coconut crowning my loaf cake. Packed with coconut flavour, this eggless cake can be baked in a loaf tin or round cake tin. It’s great sandwiched with raspberry jam and buttercream but today, I wanted an exotic cake that reminded me of the mouth-watering flavours of Thailand. If you have a large loaf tin (25cm in length), this will make one loaf. If not, two smaller tins will be perfect. Greek yoghurt is the perfect way to ensure this cake stays fluffy and rich inside and of course, there’s not a speck of butter in sight. Why use butter when coconut oil has so much more to give? Cold-pressed coconut oil makes a wonderful loaf cake as it helps it retain its shape as well as keeping the cake fluffy and perfect inside as the coconut oil cools. It’s …

I remember being six years old and fascinated by cake. Today, I’m 26 and still obsessed with it. I once had a tragic experience with Death by Chocolate Cake. I begged and begged for it until my parents gave in, probably knowing I’d regret it the next day. Needless to say, it did exactly what it said on the box. I didn’t look at another cake for a very long time. These days, I prefer my cakes with far less sugar… but still packing heaps of chocolate. There’s nothing better than the marriage between intense chocolate sponge and subtle chai spices. This four-layer cake stays super moist because the sponge is soaked with a little bit of dark rum. If you don’t want to use rum, you can use a bit of gingerbread syrup (like the kind you add to coffee) or just leave it out. As the layers are thin, the buttercream will do a great job of keeping it moist. For a rich chocolate kick, two teaspoons of good-quality instant coffee works a …

As I set up a cocoa-dusted tile under the skylight in our attic room, ready for a rich, chocolatey banana loaf, cream and hazelnuts, it struck me how much writing this blog has become ingrained within my very bones. From developing recipes, to jotting down measures on the butter-splattered pages of my notebook, and the photography and digital journey I love so much, the process of maintaining it has helped me achieve focus in almost every aspect of life. So you can imagine how much taking a six-month blog break for wedding planning bothered me. Of course the only way to make things right is with Banana and Nutella Hazelnut Cake. When it’s baking in the oven, the entire house smells like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood when mum and I would be experimenting with flavours and egg replacements. This recipe uses sweetened condensed milk which slightly caramelises in the oven, filling the entire house with the smell of how Banoffee Pie tastes. As for the egg replacer, the bananas, cornflour, baking powder, cocoa and …

I’m sorry for the long and pretentious title this week – well sort of. Usually, I like to keep recipe titles as short as possible for the sake of clarity and focus (and because I’m easily confused). Although, I think a pompous sounding title is quite fitting when describing a pompous looking lamington. Let me introduce you to my second entry to Mr P’s Re-Inventing the Lamington competition 2011. Vegan chocolate sponge filled with pandan cream cheese and coated in a layer of dark chocolate. As if this eggless lamington wasn’t trying hard enough to please already, it’s then crowned with a shard of pistachio and salted caramel glass. NOTE: I’ve had a few comments about this being a ‘vegan’ lamington. Let me clarify: this is NOT a vegan lamington because it’s filled with cream cheese and covered in a brick-ish layer of dark chocolate. However, I’ve highlighted that the chocolate sponge used for this lamington IS vegan. I repeat: these are eggless lamingtons using a vegan sponge for any vegan readers who want to make …

This time last year I won the Re-Inventing the Lamington competition hosted by Mr P of the thoroughly delicious Delicious Delicious Delicious. Not bragging or anything. My Shrikhand Spice Lamingtons consisted of a traditional Shrikhand sandwiched between eggless honey-flavoured sponge, coated in milk chocolate and pistachio splinters. There were some amazing entries and it was fantastic to see such a great deal of thought go in to the competition. I was lucky enough to walk away with an utterly cute Welsh dragon cookie cutter which I ended up making Holi cookies with. In a desperate attempt to uphold my prized title, I present to you, my first entry into Mr P’s Re-Inventing the Lamington competition 2011 – Eggless Turkish Delight Lamingtons. For those of you who don’t know, a lamington is essentially an Australian filled and covered cake. Simple as that. I love cooking with flowers, as long as the final product isn’t too strong and perfumed. Sounds like a contradiction in itself, but rose jelly and rose cream with lemon scented sponge and white …

So come on tell me, how many Valentines cards are you expecting this year? One? Two? Two dozen? Strolling through a busy high street with a numbing wind pinching my fingertips, I ramble past a quaint little chocolate shop. I am absorbed. I shuffle into the shop wide-eyed in merriment at the prospect of sampling the array of delightful delicacies. Shelves are chock-full of heart shaped chocolates packaged in heart shaped boxes that are tinted with deep shades of crimson and baby pink. Each box is tightly wrapped with the finest silk and organza ribbons, as if they are concealing the precious pearls of an oyster found in a cavernous, dark sea. I long to reach out and pick up one of everything, go home and eat until I cannot move. Good job the costly price tags force me to march straight out of that wicked chocolate shop which had fallen from grace. I left those heart shaped chocolates in heart shaped boxes in the shop that reminds me so much of the chocolate shop …

4 days agoby sanjanamodhaThis Melt-in-the-Mouth Burnt Aubergine and Spinach Curry is my most popular recipe to date. It’s the one I get the most emails, comments and messages about and it lights up my heart to read about how much you love it. I love it too. I live and breathe Gujarati food. Simple vegetarian dishes we’d eat every night when I was young are what have inspired my love of cooking today. Oroh was one of those dishes mum would cook as a midweek dinner after our evening swim at our local leisure centre. Oroh is simply a name for smoky aubergine

4 days agoby sanjanamodhaSimple three lentil daal (urad daal, moong daal and tuver daal) with lots of ginger, chillies, mustard seeds and curry leaves. Tomatoes and salt to balance out the flavours, Gujarati style. These lentils are widely available in all good supermarkets and Indian grocers. Served with roasted butternut squash rotli. I added mashed roasted squash, toasted cumin and a handful of other spices to my usual chapatti flour and kneaded to make a smooth dough. They were then rolled and cooked on a steel plate until golden. SWIPE LEFT FOR THE DAAL INGREDIENTS . . . #daal#indianfood#foodblogger#indian#butternutsquash

5 days agoby sanjanamodhaMost of you will already know that the only reason I get out of bed on a non-work day is to eat a great breakfast. My favourites include Masala Poori with Potato Curry and Sweet Semolina, as well as Stuffed Paratha or Thepla and Chai. When I’m seeking to start my day with something a little sweeter, I always look to my sweet spice tin. It’s a box dedicated to the spices I use less often in making savoury dishes and one of the best things in my kitchen. Inside, you’ll find whole cardamom, red saffron threads in a little

5 days agoby sanjanamodhaSprouted Mung Bean Breakfast Noodles are my go-to healthy Indian breakfast As much as I live for stuffed paratha, these spiced noodles pack the punch I crave on a chilly morning, without all the ghee. The stir-fried vermicelli noodles are tossed with sprouted mung beans, crackled mustard seeds, curry leaves, chillies and turmeric for a flavoursome breakfast number you’ll cook again and again. Transform it into a filling lunch or dinner with the addition of pan-fried tofu. SWIPE LEFT FOR THE INGREDIENTS. Recipe is on the blog . . . #f52grams#heresmyfood#vegansofig#huffposttaste#breakfast#vegansofig#veganrecipes#noodles#vegannoodles#thecookfeed